The Laws of our Fathers kc-4

by Scott Turow

  The plan emerged by turns between them, traded back and forth. Michael would be told that the F BI was looking for me because of the draft and that the money in Las Vegas was needed to support me in Canada. He would know no more, and could say nothing if questioned. To protect him from kidnapping charges, in the unexpected event that anything went awry, I would go to Las Vegas with him. I would be seen in his company, a happy volunteer, on the same plane, at the same motel, the rental car counter. For my safety, though, I would observe the pickup from a distance, part of the giddy gambling throng in the Roman Coin's mammoth casino. If anything misfired, if the Bureau or hotel security or the Las Vegas police stepped in as he received the money, I would depart instantly, mix into the crowd, and go North. If worst came to worst, if Michael was held, I could call the FBI and my parents and explain what I needed to explain when I reached Canada.

  Even after this scheme was fully described, deliberated, quilted together between them, a strangled voice reared up in me. Crazy, it said, this is crazy.

  'It's an insane thing for Michael,' I said.

  'He'll do it,' said June. She stood up and ran her hands down her thighs to smooth her dress. Her face was harshly contained. 'I'll talk to him,' she said.

  When I got back to Robson's, the dinner rush was beginning. Sonny was behind the lunch counter, holding a coffeepot and flirting in a harmless way with an old guy in a flannel shirt, a heavyset man with rough skin. The hour and the needy way he savored her attention, like a flower turning toward the sun, made me think he was a widower. She touched his hand to still him when she saw me. My look appeared to alarm her. 'You fucked up,' I told her.

  'What? What did I do?' She placed the coffeepot back on the Bunn machine behind her. She was a little pale with weariness -she'd been on her feet for twelve hours now – and, as ever, in no mood to contend with criticism. She asked why I wasn't gone.

  'You told someone what I told you this morning. And now I'm in shit up to my eyeballs.'

  'Told what? What are you talking about?' 'You know what I mean.'

  The old man at the counter had stopped stirring his coffee to watch.

  'What is wrong with you?' she asked. Her full brows were drawn into her eyes in a pained way. She clearly hoped for better from me.

  We went out back again, but now stood at a distance in the graveled alley. June and Eddgar had warned me repeatedly that it was a bad idea to come back here. But I had insisted Sonny was the logical choice. She would come through, I said. If she'd made a mistake, she'd be eager to correct it. They capitulated only because they were desperate for the credit card and had no other sources for the money, Eddgar's hearings having left them and their organization broke. I, of course, had other motives. I needed to know for myself.

  'What kind of shit are you in?'

  'Deep.' I told her she must have mentioned my kidnapping to somebody.

  'No one. No. One.' 'What about Graeme?'

  'Graeme? He left last night. He'll be in San Raphael all week. Have you ever heard of Primal Scream therapy?'

  Eddgar had warned me. 'She'll lie to you,' he said. 'She'll deny everything. Watch,' he'd said. I had girded myself, but now I was helpless not to believe her.

  'Well, the FBI is on me.'

  'Already? Oh Jesus.' She naturally assumed that the FBI was pursuing me for draft evasion and could not comprehend what kidnapping would have to do with that. I shook my head repeatedly rather than explain: I was not going to make the same error twice. Down the alley, she crossed her arms over the white uniform to protect herself from the evening chill. She remained peeved.

  'So what do you need, Seth? Is there something I'm supposed to do to help, or did you just come back to accuse me of selling you out?'

  ‘I need a credit card.'

  'A credit card?'

  'Just go inside. When somebody pays with a credit card, bring it out here. I'll be back in five minutes. Less.' June was parked around the corner, at the end of the alley, in the car. She wore a headscarf and dark glasses, something in the nature of a disguise. The travel agency where she'd booked the tickets was right there on Campus Boul, ready to close. She'd called ahead explaining she would have to leave her children home alone and they'd promised that June would be in and out in five minutes. The plan, by which we'd pay with this hijacked credit card, seemed almost sensible to me. I had not calculated beforehand the subtle psychological effects of declaring myself an outlaw. I already cared less about anyone's judgments of me, including my own.

  'You're crazy,' she said.

  'I need this. I'm telling you, I need this.'

  'Why?'

  'Don't ask why. You're always telling me you care for me. You have to save your life, but you care for me. Well, now my life needs saving.'

  'You can't explain? You're going to charge something on someone else's credit card?'

  'I need to get on an airplane, Sonny. I have to get away.' I was going to offer more, but I stopped. The skein of tenuous connections

  Cleveland and Hobie, my parents and the army and my freedom could not be tied together in my mind. Instead, again, it was simply she and 1.1 had fomented, with barely any masking of my intentions, one more scene between us, one more insistent demand that she show that she cared for me. I might as well have been some guy in the back seat of a Chevy saying, 'Prove it.'

  'Look, I'll fade this,' I said. 'If it goes to shit, you tell them I must have picked your apron pocket when you came back here to talk to me. You'll be protected.'

  'Protecting me's not the point, Seth.'

  'Well, what is?'

  'This is crazy.'' A wind came up then and snatched the little paper tiara off the top of her head. She watched it skitter down the pavement, then let her abundant dark hair down and shook it out. A minute passed while she bundled it back into the net. When she finished, I could feel the remoteness that had settled upon her. I had finally, fully destroyed myself with her. Looking down the alley, with the crisp white apron rising on the breeze, was the dark gorgeous girl I'd met on the bus a year before, who'd been reluctant at first to have anything to do with me and who now knew she'd been right. She'd always been intrigued by the mad, imperfect piece of me, the fact that I could let go of more than she could. But now she had witnessed the havoc that wreaked. Her rejection set a siren of regret singing in me. In spite of everything I had done to my parents, it was the first time I realized I was out of control, that the untamed parts of me were destroying what the saner self really wanted.

  'Look, I'll give you the money,' she said finally.

  'It's too much. You can't afford it. There are other people.'

  'Other people? God, Seth, what are you into?'

  'It's almost four hundred bucks. So I need the credit card.'

  She stood there, frowning deeply. ‘I have it. Most of it. I've been saving a lot. I wanted to give Zora something before I left. She can wait.'

  ‘I need it now.'

  ‘I have it now. Gus will cash a check. Just wait.'

  When she handed over the lump of bills, I knew we had settled accounts. So far as she was concerned, everything was complete.

  'I'll pay you back.'

  'Someday,' she said. 'Look, I've got to get inside. I have half a dozen orders up. Gus is ready to kill me.' She kissed me somewhat officiously on the cheek. 'I'm worried about you.' 'You probably should be.'

  She pulled the grate closed behind her as she returned to the restaurant, a slip of white closed off from me by the hard sound of iron. She was gone now for good.

  'Control the random element,' June said.

  Lucy waited outside in the car while June went over it all again. Michael and I sat beside each other on one bed in the motel room and June stood, facing us. Eddgar, of course, was gone, present only in the commands which June relayed in her domineering, efficient way.

  'For the next twelve hours you are Seth. You are Michael. Be rigorous about it. Be serious. What's your name?' 'Seth Weissman,' Michael answered. She point
ed at me. I frowned but she pointed again. 'Michael Frain,' I said.

  'Now switch IDs. Right here.' We swapped wallets; Michael's was a worn lump, with Western tooling. June gave me Michael's air ticket.

  She went over the rest of it. Timing. Surveillance. How to handle the money. In his intense, focused way, Eddgar had envisioned every detail. He was like an architect, building the entire structure in his imagination.

  'There won't be any trouble, Seth,' she said to Michael. 'But if there is, remember: not a word. Don't hassle with them. Don't give them an excuse to trump something up, or to smack you around. Just keep silent. When you get your phone call, we'll figure out how to handle it. Michael,' she said to me, 'you listen to this, too.'

  I'd heard, but looked away, disturbed by her command, her aplomb. Colonel June. How many off-sites – basements, warehouses, cousins' apartments – had she stood in giving orders to her commandos? Union actions. Work stoppages. Soledad. The ARC. There was no trace of nerves, no sign of doubt. Her shoulders were square, her lithe frame hardened. It would have been better, I knew, if she enjoyed this less. 'Let's get this over with,' I said.

  Down in the Bug, Lucy waited. The cool night was settling in as always. It occurred to me – a thought heretofore lost in so much else – that I was leaving this landscape, too. The hills, the fog, the California majesty that always seemed like magic to a flatlander. I pined a bit.

  ‘I am completely weirded out,' said Lucy in the car. 'This is the weirdest thing. Nobody tells me like any-thing.'

  'Michael and I are doing something,' I said. 'That's all. He's helping me with something. Just be cool.'

  We headed for the airport, where Lucy would drop us. Money was tight for a third ticket and, more important, I would need the car in Canada. We'd agreed, therefore, that she would drive to Las Vegas. She'd arrive by morning. We would meet her at the motel, a cheap place the travel agent had found down the Las Vegas strip. This plan, of hasty origin, had taken no account of the fact that Lucy had never driven a stick shift. In the motel parking lot, I'd given her a half-hour lesson, actually applauding every time she brought the machine through the pressure point without stalling it out. She seemed to feel immensely rewarded by my confidence that she could do it. Hobie had always refused to let her drive Nellybelle.

  'Just get it in fourth and keep going,' I told her, leaning into the car from the walk at the airport. A jet was screaming by at just that moment. The air was full of sound and engine fumes.

  'Right.' She bit down on her lip. 'I'm already telling myself that I can't pee till Las Vegas.'

  I clapped Michael on the shoulder to make sure he was still all right. June had chosen to say goodbye to us at the motel-room door, as we headed out. She was wary of Lucy, of raising curiosity about her role. June was just here to bid farewell to me, we'd said.

  'Come here, Seth,' June had called as we passed out the motel room door. Still not in the drill, I turned around as well, and as result was left gawking as she flowed sinuously into Michael's arms and drew him to her. For all my imagining, the sight of the two of them together was astonishing. Eddgar's wife. Silent Michael. He had come to her willingly, and clutched her with evident desperation. As her head was gripped to his chest, her eyes were wide open and caught some of the light. She looked at me directly, coolly I thought, enduring the moment and seeming, if only for the instant, more interested in my reaction than her

  Lucy's route took her down the central valley to Tulare, Bakers-field, and Barstow, then, in the cool of darkness, across the desert, between the far-off hulking crags of the foothills and the mountains. She has told me the story many times. Occasionally she could see the lights of other cars approaching from miles off and felt comfort in the notion of company. It took longer than she could imagine for these vehicles to arrive, and then they flashed past in a tremendous snapping break of wind and were entirely gone. For quite some time she was convinced she was seeing things in the terror of the desert night, odd shapes gripped to the front grilles of the passing autos, forms which for all the world looked like bodies strapped above the bumpers. They were ice bags, she realized finally, secured across the front grilles as a precaution against engines overheating in the desert.

  For the most part, she was alone. She heard the wind, the sound of her own speed; she smelled the dry, dusty odor of what was outside. She tried to control her mind, not to think of what might happen if she broke down, questions we should have asked before we sent her out there. There was no music that reached the radio in those days when cars were equipped to receive solely AM. From the speakers came only spitting static and occasional voices, clear then gone, as she spun the dial while she tried to watch the road. She hurtled on, amid the vast acres of the great open flatland between the mountains, where little blowing tendrils of scrub grass, weed, and sage skated by and where what life there was took place beneath the rocks, at the level of the taproots. Cacti with spiny arms and flowers like dracena rose up periodically, as did the huge robotic forms of power-line towers. When dawn came, she could almost see every shaft of light accumulate in the open spaces like snow.

  In her weary state, and after hours of the hallucinogenic sameness of the landscape, she was unprepared for Las Vegas. It was not far from the A-bomb testing ranges only recently abandoned during the Kennedy years. Suddenly, it was there on the horizon, its lights pinking the sky for fifty miles, like some radioactive miscreant that had slouched in from the desert. I saw it many hours before, from the air. Our plane swooped overhead before we landed, above a landscape of signs towering over the low casinos. The entire garish spectrum that could be emitted by neon raged at the eyes, a wild combination like dissonant music.

  'God,' said Michael, with his face at the plane window, 'who gets the electric bill?'

  Our mission was to pick up the money as soon as possible. For that reason, we headed straight to the Roman Coin from the airport. After arithmetic, it had made the most sense to rent a car, something I'd never done in my life. The reservation was in my name. I stood beside Michael as he presented my driver's license.

  ‘I grew up in DuSable,' the rent-a-car clerk told us. 'But I don't know Shadydale.' She nodded to the license. 'Where is it exactly?'

  I thought Michael would quit at that point. If a return flight were departing at that moment, he would have left the counter and climbed aboard.

  'U. Park,' I said. 'On the Stony side. We grew up together.'

  An Italian girl from the South End, named DiBella, she barely knew where U. Park was. She had a long face and straight dark hair. Very attractive. You had to wonder if she'd come here to be a showgirl.

  'Jeez,' Michael said, wilting in the car. I drove. 'Jeez. What else can somebody ask me?'

  I tried to imagine questions my driver's license would prompt when he showed it at the cashier's cage. No, he was not that Weissman. Just in town for one day. He was playing blackjack. I told him about U. High so he might have something to say about the weird social circles of the well-to-do, the children of intellectuals, and the black kids who, in my day, only wanted to fit in with someone. We made the short trip down Paradise and traveled south along the strip on Las Vegas Boulevard, which some of the signs still referred to as US 91. The avenue was lined with tropical-shaded buildings of exotic architecture – parabolas and cones. Before them, gargantuan signs of astonishing brightness announced hotel names and their resident stars – Paul Anka and Vic Damone were both here, singers whose homogenized American sounds I found as bland as Purina, music that I more or less took as the anthem of the enemy. A number of places gaudily advertised bare-breasted French showgirls, decadence of a kind I found more intriguing.

  We drove past the Roman Coin so we could see it. It was big as an arena, a huge concave of stressed concrete that suggested some huge-winged fowl. It was set back from the road behind a lawn of thick-leaved Bermuda grasses that had been cultivated in the midst of the desert. Aloft a huge reader board sign boasted Jerry Vale's name in four-foot let
ters. I dropped Michael half a block away, as the Eddgars had suggested, in order to foil any snooper. Michael seemed relatively composed. I still had no idea what June had said to get him to do this, except that his manner suggested he knew it was dangerous.

  'I'll say this for the last time,' I told him. 'You don't have to do this for me.' I received the same stoical shrug I'd gotten on the airplane. He was powerless to resist June anyway. He was in jeans and a Western shirt of a yellow plaid, with imitation mother-of-pearl snaps. The blondish hair snaked about him, but just the dry air of the desert somehow made him look more at home than he did in Damon, living on the edge of the volcano. He stared at me in the rental car, stuck for words, as usual. It was a Chevy Bel Air with bucket seats, a car five times the size of my VW. I felt as if I were operating a tank.

  ‘I figure,' he said, 'I figure you'd do it for me, if we'd traded places.' It was a confident testimonial to our friendship which I'd never have made, but he was gone with that and on his way to meet his fate, striding down the broad walk toward the hotel.

  I drove past him and pulled into the Roman Coin, following the circular drive beyond the doormen and bellboys, in their red vests and bow ties, and followed the signs around the back where the desert had been paved over in an endless parking lot. My body rattled with fear. I had to do this, I told myself. It was a test of courage: I wouldn't think I'd avoided Nam out of sheer cowardice, I'd know I could make myself do anything. I found that this idea, which I hadn't quite pronounced before, had been circulating, like some advertising slogan, in the intervals of thought all day. I walked into the back of the vast hotel, jiggling the car keys.

  The casino, when I reached it, was vast. Beneath the intense illumination, the stainless-steel corps of electrified slot machines, the wooden tables, the bettors, the intermittent islands of green felt were all set down on the flamboyant carpeting on which golden Caesar's heads repeated endlessly on a field of blood maroon. I had arrived humming some harmless tune I'd picked up from the lobby Muzak, but that was lost in the tumult of the casino: the outcry of a thousand voices – a number always reaching a raucous crescendo in the fortunes of a game – and the bells and occasional sirens screaming up from the slots where the old dolls, with change in paper cups, banged away at the machines. I had heard about this world from friends at home, guys whose fathers had grown up in the North End and liked to come out here so they could talk tough about losing money. No windows. No clocks. The quality of the light never varied with the hour, but about now, as the night was waning, there was nonetheless a certain soiled feeling. Some of the gamblers stood with their ties loosened and collars opened. Dressed in the Roman theme, the waitresses danced by in little toga getups, their tushes projected into tempting visibility on the stilts of their high heels. At odd moments, the sounds of the brass section of a tired band carried in from one of the lounge shows.